THE BIGGEST FITNESS TRENDS OF 2017

If 2017 has its way, you’ll be obsessed with virtual boxing, eating ghee butter and competitive rowing to work up a sweat. This is the complete guide to achieving peak you this year.

When presented with the options of going for a post-work bottle of Pinot Grigio, a trip to the local lido, and a BBQ in your friend’s garden, or a 45-minute Synergy class, 10km run around the park, and a spin session in a gym with broken air conditioning, it’s often hard to stay focussed when it comes to dedicating your spare time to health and fitness.

Then, throw in the fact there seems to be a new fitness trend – whether it’s a water-based HIIT class or outdoor parkour training – almost every given week, and it can get pretty overwhelming deciding which activity is worth your well-earned cash and time, and the effort of donning your overly-tight sports bra.

As a result, we thought it was about to time we rounded up the most unusual, intense, and exhilarating health and fitness trends for 2017, so all you have to do is give it a go.

Classes that will make you strong

Water workouts

HIIT is no longer strictly land-based – this year, swimming has taken a high-velocity turn. Virgin Active offers Hydro – a circuit class in a pool that involves timed sprints, lengths that isolate your top or bottom half and aquajogging, finishing with – what else? – a plank by the side of the pool.

AquAllure at the Crowne Plaza London Docklands is a spin class that takes place underwater and chews through 800 calories per class. And SwimSanity, at several locations across London, is an aquatic riff on the world-famous Insanity workout: the drag of the water adds resistance to the hard cardio, whittling the body into a lithe powerhouse.

Now Studio Lagree, an LA gym where all classes are taught on a Megaformer (a complicated new-gen reformer pilates bed), has an outpost in London, and will be opening at least two more studios in 2017.

Exercises on the machine include the ‘wheelbarrow’ (hands are on the front of the machine and knees on the moveable back carriage, then sliding the back part away) and the ‘French twist’ (pulling cables to work on your obliques). You’ll ache the next day, but your glutes will thank you.

Virtual boxing

Boxing was 2016’s zeitgeist workout, which meant that competition for mitts and punchbags was fiercer than a round in the ring. For 2017, it’s officially gone digital.

The Boxx Method, an online workout programme is the ‘world’s first virtual boxing experience’.

It’s a series of 30-minute videos of choreographed sequences, which you can do at home so you never have an excuse to miss a workout, each running through five shadow-boxing rounds, alternated with high-intensity intervals, and culminating in a ‘knockout round’ at the end.

A monthly or annual subscription grants access to the online library and each intense class reputedly burns 600 calories, improves strength, speed and co-ordination, and continues to burn calories for 12 hours after you’ve finished.

Floating yoga

LA’s appetite for mash-up workouts continues apace: it’s all about doing your regular routine, but on boards. In-Trinity whittles the core through a sequence of yoga stretches, pilates and gentle martial-arts moves, executed while balancing on a slanting elevated board in a fitness studio.

Sandbox Fitness, another LA trend, involves reps of lunges and squats while balanced on a surfboard, in turn balanced in a sandbox. The UK’s sedate version is Sup Yoga London, a floating yoga class that uses dynamic stretches on a board on the waters of London’s Paddington Basin. Float on.

IF 2016 WAS ALL ABOUT GETTING ABS LIKE BODY COACH KAYLA ITSINES, THEN 2017 IS ALL ABOUT TURNING YOUR AWARENESS TO YOUR ‘MINDBODY’

Competitive heart rates

If you regard your Fitbit as an extension of your limbs, then heart-rate training will satisfy your thrill for metrics. It’s about finding the heart-rate ‘zone’ where your body best burns fat and is the focus at cult US club, Orangetheory Fitness.

Here, you’re strapped up to heart monitors and instructors take you to the zone using treadmills, rowing machines, TRX suspension bands and weights.

Londoners: there are three Orangetheory clubs in the capital, or you can choose the Heartcore Fitness Fitrx workout – described by one reviewer as ‘toning meets torture’ – which sends your heart rate flying through a combination of one-legged squats, planks and jack-knife crunches using TRX ropes, burpees and high knees.

During the 55-minute class, the heart monitors will project your heart rate and calorie burn on to the wall. It’ll stoke your metabolism so your body is still blasting through calories hours after class.

Hotpod Stretching

In January, Hotpod Yoga, launched its year-long package (160 classes, three-plus-a-week, all year) – a concerted corrective to the quick-fix tone of most January resolutions to get fit.

Hotpod provides yoga classes in portable, inflatable cocoon-like pods at 13 fixed locations across the UK, as well as popping up in offices, festival fields and on the ski slopes. The pods vacuum-pack away and make you bendier than you thought possible, thanks to the balmy 37C temperature.

Hardcore parkour

If you’ve already reached peak climbing, then this is the year when you should abandon the indoor wall and hit the great outdoors, scaling walls and jumping off rails: parkour is officially being recognised as a sport by Olympics officials.

If you need motivation, there are some super-human female freerunners out there, including Katie McDonnell, who’s a Ninja Warrior UK Finalist.

HIIT Dance

Nobody puts Baby in the corner, or you for that matter. At Your Beat, you can bust a move and burn calories at its Fitbeat sessions, with pop-up dance classes inspired by the likes of Rihanna, Drake and Beyoncé.

Combing HIIT exercises with easy routines suitable for all dance levels, you’ll work up a sweat and unleash your inner dancer.

Boutique rowing

If you’ve ever watched a competitive boat race, such as that between Oxford University and Cambridge University, you’ll know just how exhausting, heart-pumping and thrilling it is just to stand on the sidelines, let alone the thought of taking part.

So, how does racing against a room full of fellow rowers and burning up to three times more calories than spinning sound to you?

Opened in May, Metabolic London – the back-to-basics functional training studio in Mornington Crescent, London- has introduced gym-lovers to the capital’s very first boutique group rowing class.

Lawrence Hannah, a specialist in HIIT and functional training, has formulated a class tailored to offer a low impact total body cardio interval workout on the rower mixed with strength and conditioning drills.

The 45-minute workout is focussed around four-minute cardio sessions on the rowing machine, mixed with strength and conditioning drills, and is aimed at groups of 16, in two teams of eight.

With a strict policy of no egos and a promise to provide the toughest of classes in the industry Metabolic London will have you burning up a sweat the second you don those trainers – trust us.

Find your ‘mindbody’

If 2016 was all about getting abs like body coach Kayla Itsines (who incidentally works out for 28 minutes-a-day, three to four times a week to keep in shape), then 2017 is all about turning your awareness to your ‘mindbody’: making your workout more mindful and reaping the mental benefits of exercise.

More classes are focused on the mind, using breathing to increase focus and energy.

Virgin Active has a new Calm By Candlelight yoga class pioneered by US instructor Patrick Beach, where poses revolve around deep hip openers.

Studio One in Islington, London, recently launched its signature class ‘The Body Method’, a combination of boxing, yoga and pilates in a 45-minute workout that ends with an appreciation for what you’ve achieved, so your mind can reflect before jumping to what you’re going to have for dinner.

This September, Wanderlust yoga festival is landing in the UK as the country’s first Mindful Triathlon including what is known as a ‘108 event’ consisting of a 5k run, jog, walk, yoga, guided meditation, an artisan market, and acro, as well as Djs, live music, food and drink.

The New York Times called it ‘the place to see and be seen in a kaleidoscope of yoga wear, to clamor after classes by celebrity teachers, to leave the serious world behind’, and from the sounds of it, we couldn’t agree more.

With a mission statement promising to help you ‘find your true north — to cultivate your best self’, we couldn’t think of a better way to spend a Saturday.

The superfoods fuelling the new year

Ghee butter

Granted: creamy, fatty ghee butter, used in traditional Indian dishes, is an unexpected import from the LA set, but they’re lapping it up like cats at the cream on the west coast. The buzzy brand is Fourth & Heart, a collection of flavoured ghee made with the milk of plump, grass-fed cows: flavours include white truffle salt and California garlic.

Arctic nutrition

There’s a long list of things we covet about Scandi living, and now we want their superfoods. Love Arctic‘s products are clean eating in its purest sense: everything that goes into its berry powders and flaxseed mixtures is grown in the rough, unspoiled arctic landscape.

Smart eating

VITL, which launched November 2015, uses artificial intelligence to help you work out your own healthy meal plan: submit to the interactive consultation, created by a panel of industry experts, and the app will deliver a report about your digestion, energy, mood, immune system and antioxidant status, and recommend meals. The plan also involves advice and VITL vitamin packs, delivered monthly by post.

CREAMY, FATTY GHEE BUTTER IS AN UNEXPECTED IMPORT FROM THE LA SET, BUT THEY’RE LAPPING IT UP LIKE CATS AT THE CREAM ON THE WEST COAST

Sweet nectar

Lucuma, the fruit nicknamed the ‘Gold of The Incas’, was discovered by Peruvians in AD200, but it’s only just been repurposed in powder form – it’s iron-rich and sweetens without causing blood-sugar spikes. Insiders covet US brand Moon Juice, whose lucuma powder promises to regenerate tissues and reverse inflammation.

The fit spaces you’ll want to be in

Boom boom pow

Cult class Boom Cycle has expanded this year with its third London studio.

Not only is it its first location south of the river, but it’s on the river in the revamped Battersea Power Station. And, after you’ve ridden, you can bask in your endorphin high in the riverside cafe/juice bar.

One-stop shop

There is a move towards overachieving single destinations: 58 South Molton Street is a sort of high-end commune for experts. Here, you’ll find someone to treat you from top to toe, inside and out, whether that’s laser hair removal, bloating or psychotherapy. The building is calm and serene: you’re in safe hands.

Meanwhile, Canadian yoga brand Lululemon now has a flagship store on Regent Street with a designated yoga studio among all the leggings, plus a juice bar and a breakout area for people to work from, and it’s just around the corner from Sweaty Betty’s shop in Kingly Court.

Personal touch

An hour-a-week will no longer cut it; personal training is about to get a lot more personal.

Gyms are offering more full-body, transformative packages, which cover everything from nutrition to sleep therapy.

US fitness club Equinox has launched Tier X, which is health coaching at its most extreme. It starts with an assessment, which includes an in-depth medical and fitness questionnaire, body composition index, movement screen, postural analysis and metabolic rate measurement.

The fitness boom isn’t going anywhere, clearly, but while we’ve had our fun with the fads, it would seem people want to get back to fun, simple workouts that combine cardio and strength and aren’t so extreme that you’ll injure yourself.